Thursday, November 1, 2012

Operation Falling Leaves

THE ROLE OF THE MORRISTOWN
NJ RADAR STXTION IN THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS – By William Kelly

As the potentially catastrophic superstorm Sandy
bore down, and there was a sense of impending doom and anxiety in the air, I
reflected on an event that took place fifty years ago – in late October 1962,
when there was a similar sense of impending doom during the Cuban Missile
Crisis.

While the crisis engulfed the entire nation, threatened the
world, and has been extensively analyzed, the critical role played by the MorristownNJ radar station is ignored in most
histories of the event.

When the crisis began, with the identity of the Soviet ICBMs
in Cuba confirmed by U2 photos, the US military had no way of determining if
those missiles were ever launched because all of the radars were focused north
on the USSR.

If the Soviets launched their nuclear missiles against the United
States from Russia,
the radar system could detect the launch of the missiles, and give the military
commanders and the president up to fifteen minutes to arrange a response,
scramble bombers, prepare defensives and launch a counter-attack. Since the
major missile threat against the continental United
States was only expected from the Soviet
Union, all of the radars were aimed north, as there were no
expectations of such an attack from the South.

When nuclear missiles were discovered in Cuba it was quickly
determined that the only radar that could detect a missile launched in Cuba was
the Morristown station, which most people knew as the giant golf-ball like,
white geodesic domed radar just off the NJ Turnpike.

Two other stations, in Alabama
and Texas, were also reconfigured
to provide back up, redundant confirmation, but they were not dependable and
were not fully operational during the entire crisis.

Code named FALLING LEAVES, the Cuban Missile Early Warning
System (CMEWS) consisted of the radar station at Moorestown,
NJ, and the two makeshift stations at Laredo,
TX, and Thomasville,
AL. that maintained hotline links to the Pentagon, NORAD, and Strategic Air
Command.

As detailed in the book “The
Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons,” Scott D. Sagan
(1993) devotes more than a dozen pages to the topic, and describes Operation
Falling Leaves as a "quick fix" plug of the radar missile defense
system when it was realized that all North American missile radars were aimed
north, and that there was no system in place to warn of a ballistic missile
launched from Cuba, except the Morristown, New Jersey facility.

While the system functioned well enough to fulfill its mission,
it was not without incident as Sagan’s research shows how a US ballistic
missile test launched during the crisis in Florida was almost misidentified by
the RCA Moorestown radar crews, and could have sparked a nuclear exchange. It
resulted in a change in policy and a postponement of all such missile test
launches during the remainder of the crisis.

It is also hard to believe that the military would intentionally try to fool
our own missile defense guys in a Northwoods type false flag incident and spark
a full fledged nuclear war in which nobody wins, but with the release of the
Northwoods documents, that is certainly a possibility.

In The Limits of
Safety, Scott Douglas Sagan writes, “The safety record seems quite
extraordinary however, with the most hazardous technology of all: nuclear
weapons. There has never been an accidental, unauthorized detonation of a
nuclear weapon, much less escalation to accidental nuclear war. Why? How
have imperfect humans, working in imperfect organizations and operating
imperfect machines, been so successful? Have the military organizations that
maintain custody and control over U.S.
nuclear weapons done something extremely intelligent to avoid accidents? Have
they been designed in such a way to produce reliable safety? Or have they
merely been extremely lucky?”

“The point is especially obvious for anyone who tries to do
historic research with records kept at massive collections like the National
Archives: theories are absolutely
necessary to tell you where to look for evidence. (The final scene of the movies Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which the
ark of the covenant is slowly wheeled into a mammoth government warehouse,
conveys a sense of how effective historical objects are hidden in the recesses
of the archives.) Using the theories discussed in chapter 1 as guides, I was
able to explore the historical records of the U.S.
military, searching for clues.”

“The literature on the Cuban missile crisis is immense, but
no scholar has previously studied the emergency radar warning system, which the
United States
deployed on a crash basis in October 1962 after the Soviet missiles were
discovered. A study of the activities at the three radars used in this
Operation Falling Leaves appeared to me, however, to be a very useful way of
comparing the strengths of the two theoretical perspectives, since these
theories provide contrasting expectations about the warning system’s
reliability.”

“These historical records confirmed the more optimistic view
of the high reliability theorists. They reported on no serious false warning
incidents occurring during the crisis. Indeed, the Falling Leaves after-action
report recommended that the emergency radar system be set up again if there
were ever another superpower crisis.”

“The first case is a study of a series
of false warnings emanating from the emergency ballistic missile warning system
that were activated in October 1962 to detect missile launches from Cuba…When
the Soviet missiles in Cuba were discovered by the United States, a serious
deficiency became immediately obvious: despite the enormous sums spent on the
BMEWS radars facing north, the United States had absolutely no capability in
place to detect a missile launched from the south, from Cuba.”

“Washington
policymakers had simply never anticipated that the Soviets would outflank the
BMEWS radars in this manner. The seriousness of this gap in missile warning
coverage was immediately recognized by the Strategic Air Command, which required
warning in order to launch vulnerable bombers into the air to avoid
destruction, and by the Executive Committee (ExComm) of the National Security
Council, which was also informed of the problem. In response, the air force
quickly initiated an emergency Cuban Missile Early Warning System (CMEWS)
program, code-named Falling Leaves, to provide tactical warning in the event
that the Soviet missiles in Cuba
were launched.”

”Three radars in the United States were utilized in the Falling Leaves
emergency warning program…To provide independent and redundant sensors, the Air
Defense Command also immediately proceeded to alter two other radars and turned
them to face Cuba. At Laredo, Texas,
an Air Force MPS-14 space-tracking radar was
shifted to the ballistic missile warning mission after real time radar display
equipment was sent from the Sheyma, Alaska,
sensor site. The Laredo radar
became operational on the night of October 28-9, and was considered to be a
backup system for the more capable Moorestown radar. It
too had to overcome significant operational problems. Several outages were
caused by lack of spare parts and a failure to send the maintenance
instructions for the display equipment sent from Sheyma. Inadequately trained
contractor crews manned the radar control center throughout the crisis. Most
importantly, there was no capability for a rapid and accurate test of the Laredo
system.”

“The third Falling Leaves site was in Thomasville,
Alabama, where an Air Defense Command
Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system FPS-35 radar (a radar normally
used for aircraft detection and identification) was modified to provide a
backup ballistic missile warning capability. Numerous outages occurred at Thomasville,
however, due to lack of spare parts and maintenance instructions for the
modified equipment, and the radar was therefore not operating for over 16
percent of the emergency period. Inadequate secure communications capability
between Thomasville and higher
headquarters also existed for the first days of operation. Although the
telephone “hotline” between the site and NORAD Command Control and Display
Facility (CC&DF) enabled instantaneous verbal reports, all classified
messages had to be sent over a jerry-rigged network, which took over two hours
to deliver messages between Air Defense Command Headquarters and Thomasville.”

“…These log books entries, supplemented
by air force unit histories and interviews with the key participants in the
Falling Leaves operations, paint a much more alarming picture of the CMEWS
project than that which exists in the official after-action reports. Indeed,
these documents demonstrate that at least three false warning incidents
occurred during the Cuban crisis.”

Spoofing Ourselves

“The first incident was a relatively
minor ‘scare’ at the Moorestown radar site, the cause of
which was quickly discovered and soon fixed. In 1962, the U.S. Air Force and
the U.S. Navy regularly flight-tested ICBMs, IRBMs (intermediate range
ballistic missiles) into the Atlantic Ocean out of
Patrick Air Force Base on Cape Canaveral and adjacent
ocean areas off Florida. NASA
also regularly launched space vehicles and satellites from Cape
Canaveral.”

“A small number of these launches went
directly over the island of Cuba
and officials at the Department of Defense quickly recognized the potential for
such missile launches to be misinterpreted by the Cubans or Russians in Cuba.
It was possible, for example, that Soviet or Cuban warning systems might
misidentify a test missile as an attack. An errant or malfunctioning rocket
could be particularly provocative if it hit Cub during the crisis. In fact, as
recently as November 1960, portions of a Thor missile that malfunctioned in
flight during a satellite launch, had impacted in Cuba, reportedly killing a
cow and causing strong diplomatic protests from the Castro government. The
Pentagon therefore ordered that any missile launches whose trajectory went over
Cuba would be
postponed, a decision that fortunately stopped a scheduled Thor missile launch
that would have passed over the island on October 24.

”The postponement of this potentially provocative missile launch demonstrates
that the Pentagon officials were cognizant of the danger that these missile
launch operations in Florida might create a false warning for Soviet and Cuban
forces in Cuba. They treated the danger seriously and took immediate action to
solve the problem. In the haste to deploy an emergency U.S.
missile warning system against the Soviet missiles in Cuba,
however, no one apparently thought about the possibility that a U.S.
missile launch might be misidentified by the U.S. Falling Leaves radars.”

“No one had arranged for the CMEWS radars to receive timely
advance notification of all U.S. missile launches from Florida, most of which
(like the ICBM tested at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California discussed in
chapter 2) continued according to a schedule during the crisis.”

“The danger of a false warning was
greater than anticipated during the first days of the Cuban missile crisis
because the redundant sensors, which had been designed into the system to
provide overlap and confirmation capabilities, did not become operational
simultaneously. It was considered critical to get at least some warning system
in place as soon as possible. The Moorestown radar was
the first of the Falling Leaves sites to become operational, achieving initial
capability against Cuba
on October 24.”

“The second sensor site, at Laredo,
did not become operational until October 28. 30 On the afternoon of October 26,
however, before the second sensor site was available to provide redundant
warning information, a Titan II ICBM was fired on a test launch toward the
south Atlantic.”

“The Moorestown
radar operators had not been anticipating this missile launch when, suddenly,
it appeared on their display screens. Because of the extremely close range of
Soviet missiles in Cuba
to the United States,
the Falling Leaves operators expected to receive only five minutes of warning
and perhaps less, between detection of a medium-range ballistic in flight and
its impact in the southern United States.
The radar operators recall in interviews that they were, quite naturally,
shocked when a missile suddenly appeared on their radar screens. It took a few
tense minutes, in the crisis control room at Moorestown, for air force duty
officers and contract civilian personnel to recognize, as their radar began to
show the missile heading southeast, that this was ‘a friendly’ missile with no
impact point predicted inside the United States.”

”The Air Defense Command immediately acknowledged the potential for serious
false warnings here. Colonel William Watts, of the 9th Aerospace Division, flew
down to Patrick Air Force Base to explain the problem to officials there and to
ensure that advance notification of U.S.
missile launches would be sent to the CMEWS radar sites.”

“On October 27, the commander of the Air
Force Missile Test Center further informed the higher headquarters that “the
test schedule would continue, with the prelaunch announcement policy changed so
as to avoid international misunderstanding or ‘inadvertent action.’”

“After that procedural change, there
were apparently no further alarms caused by U.S. ICBM launches. The Moorestown
operators were sufficiently concerned to recommend that in the future “a
procedure be established to allow an immediate ‘on call’ reaction for launch
and final count-down information, (to) be provided (to) all sensors.”

“There is both good news and bad news in
the history of this brief incident. The good news is that the system worked
even without redundancy: the Moorestown radar by itself
was able to discriminate between a hostile missile launch toward the U.S.
and a friendly launch toward the EasternTestRange
impact area. Moreover, rapid organizational learning took place: a potential
for false warning problems was recognized and the operational procedures for
integrating U.S.
missile launches with the Falling Leaves sites were adjusted immediately.
Imagination also helped; all missile test launches over Cuba
were canceled.”

3 comments:

I enjoyed your article, but May I ask why you think the Thomasville location had more trouble than any of the other locations. From what I have heard all of the stations suffered from limited up time. It was my understanding that the Thomasville location had a better view of airspace over Cuba? I believe my father solved one of the main technical difficulties after the modification. Increased power in the magnetron was shorting out. He moved something or better insulated some components and the reliability was much higher then. During the crisis from my knowledge. I would love to speak with you more about this. Chad.bowers@gmail dot com.

Fred I was also stationed at Tville (Sept 61 to Sept 64) I was also an A2C and worked at the GATR (Ground to Air Transmitters and Receivers) site down at the intersection of hi-way 5 and 43.

We had several spooky incidents during this same period. One of our security people took a shot at a mule in the cornfield outside our compound. It wouldn't halt .

I have one of the shot thyrotron tubes you used. i made a lamp out of it years ago.

Several of our maintenance people were sent to Key West during this operation.

It always griped me that the radar station in New Jersey always got credit for being the "only one" capable of watching traffic over Cuba during this crisis. As we found out later we were the one that did most of the work;

I also worked with the ECM B-52's flying missions against your FPS 35.

I was one of the radar operators assigned to Thomasville from October to December of 1962 was assigned TDY from Aiken AFS SC. We did have one false launch while I was on duty but it was quickly recognized as false. The unit I was assigned to was "Task Force Able" 9th Aerospace Defense Division commanded by Lt. Colonel Kenneth Gordon. To the best of my memory the computers at Lincoln Labs at Hanscomb AFB Massachusetts were used to compute launch and impact locations.